


Bounteous

by willowbilly



Category: Black Sails
Genre: Badass Pirates Being Soft and Gentle, Cuddling & Snuggling, Developing Relationship, F/F, F/M, Fluff, M/M, Menstruation, Multi, Polyamory, Polyamory Negotiations, Post-Series, Trans Character, Trans Male Character, Trans Mark Read
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-31
Updated: 2017-05-31
Packaged: 2018-11-07 05:34:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,488
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11052390
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/willowbilly/pseuds/willowbilly
Summary: It's a queer hurt, almost like the relief of peeling off an old scab, to feel her heart pulling in three separate directions and to feel it expanding to encompass the whole damn rest of the compass rose rather than be so fragile as to rip itself asunder. Anne never would have thought, before, that she'd be this fucking caring. That she'd had such a deep well of love waiting untapped within her, way down.





	Bounteous

**Author's Note:**

> Additional warnings for vulgar language and very brief references to canonical past sexual assault/abuse/rape. Although I tried to keep all transphobia and trans-related angst out of this fic, there is a moment where Mark Read is described using female pronouns, there's an oversimplified description of gender identity which uses inaccurate but well-intentioned "women living as men" language, and overt mention is made of Read having female genitals and bodily functions, i.e. periods. Also: a bit of period blood, if that squicks you out. 
> 
> I did, like, no actual research for this, but even so I found [this cool little page](https://historicengland.org.uk/research/inclusive-heritage/lgbtq-heritage-project/trans-and-gender-crossing-histories/) about some trans and gender-nonconforming historical figures in England, as well as the equally cool but less little journal article ["Thy Righteousness is but a menstrual clout": Sanitary Practices and Prejudice in Early Modern England](https://dspace.lboro.ac.uk/dspace-jspui/bitstream/2134/10271/2/READ-EMWJ2008v3.pdf) by Sara Read (last name a happy coincidence). The latter's in PDF format and casual cissexism is used throughout, but it's still really informative... even if I ended up using barely any of the info in the end. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

“Sometimes,” Anne says, “it's like he don't have a damn pair of eyes in his head to see what's right in fuckin' front of him.”

“He is a man smitten,” says Max, her beautiful voice rasping a bit with sleep, thrumming in her chest, against Anne's cheek where she lays resting skin-to-skin against her.

It's soft and close and damp, pillowed here between Max's breasts, as peaceful as the moment when she'd been looking into Jack's face as he held her cradled and blood-drenched in his desperate, worshiping hands and the dark had finally slipped over her, or as peaceful as she imagines it must have been in the velvety womb of her unknown whore of a mother, before she was born and cast out into the cruelties of the world, before she was formed. When she was still fully one with another in a way she can only now simulate in bits and pieces, in her partnership with Jack, when he trusts for her to protect his back in the heat and ringing chaos of a sword skirmish, or in the quiet, hazy moments of early dawn when the world is hushed and Max's body is a warm, corporeal, unblemished mirror of her own, both of them melding together in the sticky slack of the afterglow, swathed in a honeyed-golden illumination not of light.

“What's that s'posed to mean?” Anne asks, less waspishly than she might have otherwise, what with one of Max's hands kneading firm and knowing against the dip in her lower back, knuckles rolling beside her spine, and the other stroking hypnotically through her hair, the pads of Max's fingers massaging soothingly against her scalp. Anne finds herself luxuriating in it, pressing into the ministrations with all the indolent laziness of a cat, feeling melted and malleable and content. Another while and she may very well start to fucking purr.

She didn't just survive. She's begun to... live, as she thinks she never has before. Has begun to allow herself the tranquility of acceptance. Day to day, moment to moment. She means to cherish this. Cherish them.

“I mean that for all his cleverness your Jack loves to set his sights idealistically far ahead, on occasion, and does not bother to see the meaningless details under his nose so long as they pose no danger,” Max says. “When the sailing is smooth and the wind alive with the romanticism he thinks we think he does not indulge in.”

“He ain't 'my' Jack.”

“You are more each others' than any other two I have ever known,” Max says, mild but meaningful, a simple statement of indisputable fact, and Anne gives a grunt of concession because she has the right of it. Max always does seem to see the truths of people, has suffered deeply but in so doing has learned the art of piercing unerringly straight to the heart, and then, full of mercy, she holds back so as to leave it whole, the curious steel of her spearpoint poised just shy of puncturing the crucial knot of great, pulsing muscle, the keen edge nudged terribly tight and gentle against the tender, turgid tissue.

She's slipped, in the past. Been made to. Sliced almost deep enough to sever... but not so deeply that it could not heal.

“Doesn't explain why he still hasn't noticed his new crewman has a set of tits under that sailor shirt.” Anne's been waiting weeks but Jack has remained blissfully oblivious. At first it had been funny, but she's been getting inexplicably irritated the longer this goes on without him seeing the obvious. It's _his_ fucking ship. He should be observant enough to fucking know about the people on it.

“Why does it bother you?” Max asks, and Anne barely bestirs herself to shrug. There is quiet for awhile, just the rustle of Max combing out a tangle in Anne's freshly clean, dry hair, lifting long stretches of her tresses off her back and sifting through them until they drift back down to tickle at her ribs and shoulder blades. “You are intrigued by this new crewmember. As you once were by me,” Max surmises, and she stills as Anne goes stiff atop her.

“Are you not?” Max says, politely providing an escape, offering an opening to set it all aside and ignore it, but Anne forces herself to relax again and jerks her head in a little nod. Max resumes the sweep of her hand, sliding her fingers up over the curve of her skull, burrowing into her hair until the nape of her neck is bared and then drawing it all down again, her touch marveling as if against silk. “It is all right to admit so. You have found room in your life for both myself and Jack, after all. Yet another love would not be the death of you.”

“I don't know if it's love,” Anne says. “We just hang out sometimes. Tell jokes. He was in the army before, landlocked, so I've been teachin' him some tricks proper what with him bein' new before the mast.” Though this is more an excuse than anything. She doesn't need to teach anything new that Read hasn't already picked up on his initial stint on a merchant ship over to Nassau.

“'He?'” Max echoes inquisitively.

“She,” Anne corrects herself, but a bit of her uncertainty creeps in. It's easier to just stick to the male pronouns she's been using for Read whenever she has to talk about him with other members of the crew. Which is, admittedly, mostly Jack, who gets nosy from time to time, all eager to muck about in her business and delight in the fact that she's found it within herself to socialize. Even if it's just one person she's deigning to socialize with.

“Mark Read has not revealed to you that he is a woman, no?”

“Nah, not in plain words. Knows I know, though. Think it's why we get along. He likes that I haven't ratted him out yet.”

“I wonder,” Max muses, and elaborates when Anne hums a question. “I have met one or two people before, mostly fellow brothel workers of my acquaintance. They were ones who preferred to dress in women's clothing and take on the whole of such a feminine identity for themselves, despite having been born into the bodies of men. They claimed that it was in living within such roles that they found the truths of themselves. It would only make sense that there are born in turn women who would rather live out their lives as men.”

“Fuckin' weird,” Anne says, but she means it meditatively, casting back in her memory and recalling a particular pirate who had worn lip paint and rouge and skirts to accompany a full, long beard which bristled all the way down to their belt buckle. There'd been others she'd known of. Out from under the stifling thumb of polite society you could dress and comport yourself however the fuck you wanted, so long as you had the steel to back you.

Or you could so long as you had a cock swinging between your legs. There was a reason Anne hadn't met any other woman pirates who went freely about without passing themselves off as the opposite sex to protect themselves and make it a little easier to gain respect and recognition for their skills, rather than for their cunts.

That's what she'd thought it was with Read. Just protection, convenience. But maybe not.

 

~~~

 

There's always a bit of time getting used to the sway of the deck after having been confined to land, and it goes away faster for some than for others. Read is still walking like he's testing the give of the planks almost half a week into his second deployment with them.

At first she thinks it's inexperience, unsteadiness, his bones still cemented stolidly stiff with the solid mud of terra firma, but she slowly begins to recognize the way he's rolling a little against the swells just to feel them better, as if memorizing the sensation. She sees the relish in his hungry face when he turns it into the sea spray carried on the breeze, how sometimes in a spare moment on a fair day he'll tip his head back and just study the massive billows of the sails far above, moss-green eyes squinted against the hard blue sky as they travel up and up the towering length of the mast with such a look of wonder you'd fucking think he was gazing upon the ladder to heaven, the light drawing tears from beneath his lashes to glitter in the sun, to run shining into the faint, premature crow's feet packed into his skin like the grime of good crop-bearing soil, a man who absolutely could not be happier to be out of his element.

He looks fucking rapturous.

He looks like Jack.

Anne's never quite understood Jack's need for the ocean, for a ship, for the waves stretching out to the horizon in all directions until it's like they're the only thing left of the earth, like Noah's ark sank and all God's measly creatures drowned and even the peaks of the tallest mountains are submerged fathoms below them in the crushing dark but they, them and their huge, leaky, complicated bucket of a pirate ship, are the last left in the sun and the open air in all of motherfucking Creation, the apex predators, the fortunate, the chosen ones. There's nothing either more lonely or more suffocating. More crowded or more breathlessly open.

It makes her a little queasy sometimes, if she's being fucking frank. But Jack acts like he'll pine away and die without it.

Always an ambitious sod, with all his funny ideas, his dreams. Anne's never had any of her own. Just emotion, reaction. Existing in the present. Following him into the future only to make sure his ass is in one piece long enough to get there. Following him because it's not fucking possible for them to call it quits and split, because for all that he pines for the sea he really would die if he had to leave her for good, or her him. Would crumble all away.

They know better now than to ever allow that again. Not fucking ever.

Doesn't mean she hasn't laughed at him, tried to explain to him his expression, the nameless appetite he displays whenever he looks out over the ship, his hands tight around the railing and his body leaning into the wind.

“You're doin' it right now,” she says, gesturing sharply at his ridiculous face with its sparkling eyes and the carefully trimmed sideburns he vainly keeps at an angle he insists brings out the contours of his cheekbones, and of which he's lately begun to complain have sprouted a few too many hairs of salt amongst the pepper.

And he says, “Why, yes, darling, but I'm looking at _you,_ am I not?”

She punches him in the arm, lightly enough not to bruise because when she marks him it is in deliberate passion, not to distract them both from the obvious tide of affection overtaking her, not when her stomach's diving like a cormorant, weighed down with a fizzy dread, the suspicion that she wears the same disgusting look on her own face when she's looking back at him, or at Max... or at Mark.

It's a queer hurt, almost like the relief of peeling off an old scab, to feel her heart pulling in three separate directions and to feel it expanding to encompass the whole damn rest of the compass rose rather than be so fragile as to rip itself asunder. She never would have thought, before, when the lash was laying the scars in her back or _his_ hand was twisting between her legs while his friends all laughed at her squeals, that she'd be this fucking caring. That she'd had such a deep well of love waiting untapped within her, way down.

She'd thought entertaining even the concept of love was weakness, once. Now, though. Now she knows how destructive it is. How strong she is for enduring it.

 

~~~

 

“You got the runs?” she asks Mark one morning a bit after the first bell. He's been dragging himself around peaky and hunched, like it's only by the force of will that he hasn't folded his arms tellingly low about his midsection to try and push the pain out now that his watch is over.

“You watchin' me?” he asks, smirking playfully, all coy and interested instead of paranoid. None of his discomfort shows in his reedy, lowly-modulated voice, and she watches him shift until he's standing straight, hiding it like a prey animal hides wounds.

When he makes to duck around her she blocks him with an outstretched arm. He stops immediately when he bumps into her, blinks at her quizzically, going as serious as she is. On the verge of offense. “I just got a mite of a bellyache. Ain't been slackin' or nothing. You got something to say, say it.”

It's kind of impressive that he's working up to being angry at her, given the deference he usually affords her and Jack, something like covetous admiration in the hooded way he watches them. A young follower of their exploits, imagination caught by the myths so much that it might've very well been the likes of them who inspired Mark to take to the sea, but he's pragmatic enough not to let it cloud his judgment, even of his heroes, has enough of a backbone that he won't take an affront lying down. A quick, diligent learner with a healthy amount of self-respect. Jack was smart to snap him up the minute he came sniffing by.

She looks about them, shuffles nearer despite nobody being close enough to overhear, head ducking down to murmur. “Look. You want a new a rag to sop up the blood or don't you?”

He pulls back slightly even as she does, turning to peer point-blank into her eyes. Whatever he sees there must be right, because he wets his lips and slowly nods his head.

“Then follow me,” she says, and leads him to the captain's quarters she shares with Jack.

Jack is sitting naked in front of his vanity, face stretched exaggeratedly long to hollow his cheeks as he painstakingly dabs a little brush coated with foul black gunk along the line of his stubble. He twitches his eyebrows at her in acknowledgment when he sees her reflection slide in through the door but doesn't take his eyes off his task or react until Mark sidles in after her, at which point he rears upright in alarm like something's been poked up his bare bum without so much as a by-your-leave, his scrawny shoulders and the knobbly line of his spine drawing rigid as he grabs the trousers draped over the back of his chair and whips them over his junk.

“Oh, why, by all means, don't mind me,” he snaps, flushing an indignant scarlet as Mark rakes his gaze up and down Jack's body in open assessment. “I do hope you'll have the _decency_ to _excuse_ my _appalling_ state of undress and make yourselves _right_ at home.”

“Shoulda latched the door if you were gonna be this shy,” Anne sneers, doing so.

“Are you dyeing your whiskers?” Marks asks.

“No,” Jack lies baldly, fastidiously screwing the cap onto the little dye bottle and setting it and the brush down onto a napkin with a muffled clatter and clink. “Anyways that's beside the point. Anne, I don't recall agreeing to invite guests over at odd hours sans all warning.”

“Don't worry. I'll see to it he don't tell anyone,” Anne says to Mark. He's glancing in between them, on guard as much as he is trusting. This is still a risk he's taking, for all that they two have grown friendly. More than a risk. This is... nigh on folly, for him to expose his secret like this, to take this leap of faith so perfunctorily, but Mark's inching his toes to the cliff's edge as if measuring the force it'll take to reach the sky with a single jump, balancing there on the brink like he's matter-of-factly daring himself to do it.

Jack finally twists away from the mirror to watch them pass by with a not inconsiderable amount of trepidation. “Well, that certainly sounds ominous, does it not? _What_ won't I tell anyone?”

Anne opens and kneels before her clothes chest to rummage for the pouch with the clean linen clouts. Pulls one out and passes it to Mark, hovering diffidently beside her.

“Really,” Jack is prattling on, apparently so preoccupied with his own griping as to have missed the exchange of the rag, “if this is about the disposing of a body or procuring a bribe you know I'll be more than happy to help, but surely it could have waited until late—”

He falls into dumbfounded silence, jaw dropping like an anchor, as Mark undoes his drawstrings and drops his breeches, yanking them down to his knees with as abrupt and businesslike a maneuver as you please. For a moment his shirttails still hide him but then he hikes them above his hips to get them out of the way as he switches out the clouts, the thick thatch of dark hair at the juncture of his wiry thighs thrown tellingly bare. Anne offers an empty bucket for the bloodied rag he gingerly extracts from his drawers and he obligingly discards it with a flick of his wrist and the wet smack of soaked fabric on wood before tucking the fresh folded pad into the crotch of his clothing and pinning it in place with brisk, practiced efficiency. His trousers are back up and everything neatly arranged within one breath and the next, nothing at all amiss.

Anne, still crouching, snags the pitcher of water from Jack's vanity and pours it into the bucket to let the soiled rag soak. Tries not to let on that she sucks in the scent of menstrual blood like a horny dog when the cool water hits its heat and sends it swirling out, the curiously heady, iron-heavy musk of it. Inconspicuously gauging whether or not she can tell any difference between its odor and that of her own.

From the bemusedly pleased quirk of his lips she thinks Mark catches her at it anyways.

“What in the name of sweet fuck did I just witness and what does it mean,” Jack says, equal parts flatly disbelieving and plaintive.

“Don't mean nothing 'sides I ain't got a cock,” Mark says with a shrug, and there's now a hint of uncertainty betrayed by his posture, by the clench of his fists and the defiant lift of his chin. “Still more a man than half the fuckwitted pussies on this ship. Ain't never lied 'bout that.”

Jack stares for a bit, then makes a show of clearing his throat and looking indifferent, if still nettled at the unannounced invasion of his privacy. “All right. Then. Yes. All right. You are what you are, then, and I see not the slightest reason to argue with you on what is clearly a very personal matter.”

“'Specially seein' as I'll slit your throat afore I let you blab, Calico Jack or no,” Mark adds, teasingly but for the glint of steel promise beneath, but for his hands having only half unfurled.

“Yes, okay, Jesus,” says Jack, putting his palms up in cajoling surrender even as he's seemingly unable to resist the semi-suicidal urge to dramatically roll his eyes.

Anne reaches over and grabs Mark's hand in reassurance, his sun-browned skin dry and warm, a smudge of blood tacky on his index finger like an anointment of primordial similarity linking them together, the shape of their hands fitting just right as he relaxes into her. His are a little smaller than hers, despite the blunt squareness of their make and the rough callouses from rope and oar and sword, the size of his hands and feet one of the few signs he wasn't well able to hide.

Jack is thoughtfully considering their joined hands with something of calculation, absentmindedly rearranging his breeches to better cover his lap. Odds are he's kicking himself for not catching on earlier. Idiot. As are all the rest.

Probably for the best though. A lot more of them would be a lot deader otherwise.

 

~~~

 

“You know, I was beginning to wonder if I should be jealous,” Jack says, pacing fretfully.

“Are you?” asks Anne, perched on the bunk with a knife and a whetstone, sharpening it in time with the sway of the ship. He's been monopolizing Mark's off hours as much as she has of late, getting along well enough to be worrisome. Hasn't really room to talk.

“Jealous? No. Well, somewhat. Yes. Yes, I am rather jealous, come to think of it. Very much more so than I would have expected.”

“You got over it with Max,” Anne points out. “The fuck's your problem here?”

“Perhaps there is a period of acclimation which we are all destined to undergo every time there is a an adjustment which occurs in the dynamics of our little family,” he says, illustrating his hypothesis with grand, somewhat distressed gestures. “You must admit it went rather rockily with Max until very recently, and even so you surely know that she does not much care for me in her bed, certainly not as she does you.”

“So she ain't into cock,” Anne says. “I am.”

“But is Mark?” Jack asks, fully pensive now, pursing his lips and smoothing his mustache with slender, jittery fingers. “I don't mean to wail that I am in any way neglected, but it does sting my sense of fairness somewhat that I must content myself with a fraction of our triad whereas you, in the meanwhile, are in possession of the whole.”

Anne draws the blade at too steeply an angle against the stone, eliciting a painfully shrill, scraping squeal.

“Not,” Jack hurries to clarify, “that I have any issue with this arrangement, much less a desire to forcibly alter it. I do not begrudge you your happiness, my dear, and despite the many difficulties which have beset us it has become exceedingly apparent that Max is as crucial to your happiness as am I myself. Not to mention the fact that the few times Max and I have acknowledged each other... sexually, it was... very weird.”

She grunts noncommittally, but starts to work fixing the edge she'd dulled with a conciliatory nod of her head.

“I suppose it's simply my ego pricking at me, telling me that I deserve an 'extra' bit in this arrangement to match yours. No matter that this is not a competition, and there is nothing extra about it.”

“None of that's it,” Anne says.

“I— beg pardon?”

She tightens her hand around the knife handle until her knuckles stand out stark white against the skin and then stabs it into the bunk frame, the tip driving into the wood with a pleasing _thunk_ and then sticking there, frustrated at having to articulate the gut instinct understanding she has of it. “You're afraid of me bein' jealous. Not you.”

He makes as if to speak, brows drawing down and mouth forming an O, but he then visibly reins himself in and waves her on.

“That time Max stuck her thumb in your mouth whiles we were fucking. I was... confused. Kind of angry. You let me have her all to myself but the moment I thought you might have her too my feelings were fuckin' hurt. Thought you'd throw me aside for her, and in the end you did.”

There was more there, with Max. All the tangles of pity and resentment and the bewildered agony of attraction she'd first mistaken for envy, mistaken for wanting Max's pretty looks and her grace and her patience and her manners, the fact that Max was at home in women's clothing and eye kohl and didn't hide her face beneath the low brim of a hat. Had never felt the boiling rage coalesce into the violent taking of a life, had never had to murder someone with her own two hands to get her way. The fact that she didn't seem to have the same core of dead stillness weighing her down into dumb surrender. The fact that she'd seen it in Anne, and had accepted it anyways and pledged to protect her, with a compassion and an insight even Jack had never reached.

The fact that Jack hadn't seen all of it festering, way back when Anne was listening to him call Max the whore in the tent, call her imprisonment and abuse there a strategic means to an end, her rape a necessary evil.

“There isn't a day that goes by that I do not regre—” Jack starts, but Anne cuts him off.

“That's done with. We've grown since then. _I've_ grown.” She suppresses the impulse to press a hand over her heart, instead grabs onto her own knee and squeezes, the other still holding the cool, angular weight of the whetstone. Jack makes his way over and sits beside her, puts his hand cautiously over hers. “I think... I'd be able to share you now, if you want. Share you with Mark.”

“And... share Mark, with me?” Jack asks, so sweetly tentative and hopeful.

Anne smiles, just a faint tug at the corner of her mouth, but he sees it and answers it with a blinding grin. “Yeah,” she says, “so long's he likes cock.”

“Oh... my God, wait,” Jack says. “He's a _he._ A _man._ I'm a man who's falling for _another man.”_

She turns her hand around to lace their fingers together. “Least he's got a cunt?”

 _“Regardless,”_ he moans in dismay, and distractedly brings her hand up to land a little kiss upon her knuckles when she squeezes in support, and then holds her there, rubbing his chin against her, the comforting prickle of his stubble soothed by a gust of his breath as she leans into him and he sighs.

She got over it. He will, too.

 

~~~

 

“You like men?” Anne asks Mark.

“I don't mind a little buggery on occasion,” Mark says, eyes finding Jack up on the quarterdeck.

“And me?” Anne finds herself asking, startling herself, a catch in her throat like for all the nonchalance of the words they're still trying to choke her for some reason. “You like me?”

Mark looks back at her, quick and sharp like he's trying to pin her in place, and then just as quickly and sharply he smiles, the expression blooming soft over the hard, lean planes of his face like a sunrise.

Fucking rapturous.

 

 

 

 


End file.
